Do you ever wonder why raising support looks like an impossible task, even after the two days of “training” you got in mission candidate school? Maybe you have spent hundreds of dollars on fees and travel to a weekend workshop, but you still freeze up at the point of picking up the phone and making an appointment.

The reason could be that you were given inspiration, information and strategy, but you were not trained.

The KCT definition of training is the same definition that applies to learning to swim, playing a musical instrument or to flying an airplane. This kind of training can’t be accomplished through lectures, reading books or listening to inspirational speakers. You learn to swim by getting in the pool; music by picking up the instrument, flying by belting into the flight simulator and committing to practice, practice, practice until the skill becomes second nature. Quick and successful partnership development only happens as a result of practicing the ministry skills that Jesus modeled for us until they become second nature.

You are trained when partnership development is no longer about your need for money, but about the need of the church and of individual believers to be connected with the blessing, the joy and the rewards of a primary purpose for their redemption: being the expression of Christ to the nations.

You are trained when you have complete confidence that your story and your vision will inspire others to enthusiastically join you in prayer and financial partnership.

You are trained when you have no fear of picking up the phone and making an appointment.

Training at that level cannot be accomplished in a few hours or a couple of days. We are told it takes 21 days to establish a habit. KCT could easily compress the 18 hours of online training into three days or a week, but that could not produce a joy-filled performance of the partnership development ministry.

Instead, we do the online training for an hour and a half a day, four days a week for three weeks. All you will learn in the way of “content” happens in the first week, and accounts for only about 15% of your ultimate success. What assures success is what you do in the final two weeks and between sessions. You will be given assignments and required to practice the relational and communication skills that Jesus modeled until you fully achieve the confidence that this is true spiritual ministry and not mercenary manipulation.

– Jerry Long, September, 2007

Recently I conducted a training course for a group of missionaries to help them build confidence and develop strategy to raise their support. Wayne, a veteran missionary, read a couple chapters of required reading* and came back saying, “I’ve discovered that everything I’ve been doing is wrong!”

Wayne had been doing all the normal things missionaries do to raise their support: he wrote newsletters, spoke in churches, and prayed faithfully that God would raise up people to support him and his family. After about ten years he had less than $50 in regular monthly support. In order to sustain his calling he maintained a job ten months out of every year in order to save enough money to make annual short-term mission trips. This wasn’t the way he wanted to carry out his ministry.

It was a credit to Wayne’s faith that he kept going so long. Most missionaries who fail to raise their support within a couple of years end up declaring, “I guess God hasn’t called me after all.”

Here are the three main things Wayne learned he was doing wrong, and was amazed that he was among the last to know about them.

Focused on the Wrong Need

Wayne discovered that his whole focus was on his need for support. He looked to churches and individual believers as the source of his support. He had forgotten that God had obligated Himself to meet his need. Wayne learned that God was calling him to focus on the church’s need to be reconnected with its primary purpose for existence, to be the expression of Christ to the nations. He came to believe that once he became successful at sharing the benefits and rewards people would receive from doing what God has called them to do, they would want to invest in his ministry.

Writing Letters rather than Ministering Face to Face

Wayne, like nearly all missionaries, feared asking for support. He feared being perceived as a beggar. He feared rejection. Fear caused him to default to sending impersonal form letters to people. To him, this was the least intrusive means of making his need known.

When Wayne realized he wasn’t representing his own need, but rather the need of believers to be connected with God’s purpose for their lives, he was set free from all mercenary guilt. Now he is free to minister to them like a friend and a brother. He has the privilege of connecting them with their due reward for obedience.

Neglecting the Power of Discovery

Wayne’s third revolutionary insight was the power of the parable. Jesus told stories because when people discover truth in a story they don’t argue with it; it is their discovery. Wayne, like many missionaries doing partnership development, was trying to preach, trying to explain and trying to admonish people to support him. He found it was much more powerful to simply share his stories and the experiences through which he had discovered the joys, blessings and benefits of obedience to the great commission.

How could a missionary like Wayne suddenly realize he is among the last to know fundamental principals about raising support? The fact is that most missionaries are in the same boat. They are conditioned by the attitudes that portray missionaries as beggars who are a drag on church budgets.

The only way I know to break the cycle of wrong attitudes is to challenge them one missionary at a time and one believer at a time. That requires Bible-based training that builds knowledge, skills and attitudes that will result in the ability to share the vision freely and confidently.

– Jerry Long, September, 2007

* Required reading for the KCT course: Funding Your Ministry Whether Your’re Gifted or Not! By Scott Morton

Embrace the Pain

Raising support for faith ministry is terrifying.  If you are thinking about doing it and you are scared, you are normal.  If you aren’t scared you may be a little strange.

Once you have confronted the issue of the biblical basis for raising support and found it is sound, once you have determined it is indeed God’s calling on your life personally, and once you have decided you are going to stick with it as long as it takes, there is one final hurdle that will make or break you.  It is the issue of pain.  Pain is the big one.  It is the overwhelming, the brain paralyzing, the universal missionary-devouring enemy of all time. 

The pain happens because raising support, like many Kingdom concepts, runs radically counter to our culture.  In fact, it is downright repulsive.  It calls for dependence on others and we are brainwashed to be independent.  It calls for patience but we want it all now.  It calls for courage; we are cowards.  If you doubt or flatly deny that you fear the pain raising support, you aren’t being rational or truthful and that will hurt you in the long run.

Think about the little medieval monk who paid his keep in the monastery by begging from house to house. Can you imagine anything more degrading?  That is the picture the average church member has of you raising your support. To live out that image you must thrive on pain.

A good analogy of thriving on pain is the way a sailboat gets where it is going.  There are three forces at work when a sailboat moves through the water:  There is the force of the wind, the resistance of the water and the attitude of the sail. Let’s apply them one at a time:

The Force of the Wind

Let’s say the wind represents the power of your calling and the drive behind your dream to serve in ministry,   God told the apostle Paul, “. . . be my witness to all men of the things (you) have seen and heard” (Acts 22:15).  That calling was the wind in Paul’s sails. It is very likely the same kind of wind that drives you in your ministry dream.

The Resistance of the Water

The resistance of the water represents the pressure and the pain of uncertainty, the humility and outright rejection you face, not only in raising your support but in your whole lifetime of confronting fallen culture. 

I find it fascinating how Jesus faced pain. He had to know the blows, the welts, the lacerations, the spikes and the humiliation of hanging naked between two criminals was going to hurt.  During those last days, however, he did nothing to escape it.  In fact, everything he did was calculated to guarantee it.  When witness hurled false charges he clammed up and didn’t deny them.  When they accused him of saying he was the Son of God and King of the Jews he readily admitted it. He mustered and engaged all the physical strength he had in order to endure the beatings and then haul his own cross up that hill. 

The Attitude of the Sail

The Attitude of the sail represents your mindset.  Jesus set his mind to embrace pain as a key element in redeeming his church.  Now, in fact, he is calling on you to the very same mindset.  You get to suffer with him in the process of redeeming his church. 

Would you agree the Great Commission could and should have been done centuries ago?  It hasn’t been done because church has been in non-compliance with Jesus’ final instructions.  Individual believers are in non-compliance.  The western church is rich, fat, lazy, self indulgent and can’t be bothered.  We have God’s promise that if the church were to comply it would be enormously blessed.  Individuals would be enormously blessed.  As it is, they suffer for their non-compliance and probably don’t even know it. They rarely think about it.

The one mindset that will put you squarely into your designated role in the scheme of redemption is this: In order to connect the church with the promised blessing you will not only suffer pain, you will be a pain.  Jesus’ death and resurrection was a huge intrusion on the world’s comfort zone.  The gospel is an intrusion.  Evangelism is an intrusion.  The Great Commission is an intrusion.  Raising support is an intrusion.

I have a friend who lives in Hawaii.  One day I asked if he liked to surf.  He said, “Me? No, I get in water and I can’t breathe!  Besides, there are things there that want to eat me.”  I thought he had a couple of good points.

In order to raise support for faith ministry you go against forces that at best want to hurt you if not kill and eat you.  Pastors and mission leaders don’t return your calls and don’t  respond to your e-mails.  Relatives avoid you. You have friends who graduate with marketable degrees, get real jobs and pity you for your silly idealism. People not only don’t support you, they think you are nuts for planning to go where people might kill you for preaching Christianity.  That is serious resistance and real pain, and ultimately you could leak real blood.

But here is the good news: The pain doesn’t last.  From the outset it looks like it will dog you forever, but it will not.  It is like the pain of childbirth.  When the little bundle of joy is birthed, the pain is quickly forgotten. 

Hebrews 12:2 gives up Jesus’ secret to embracing pain: 

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”  NIV

- -Jerry Long

May, 2006

Since Greek and Roman times skilled communicators have known that people resist change. They have also know that people go through five distinct stages of resistance before they make a change. Jesus, the Apostle Paul and others in the Bible understood these stages. They organized their preaching and teaching so their listener and readers could come to a decision in a natural way. (For examples, see Jesus’ discourse with the Samaritan woman in John 4:7-24; Paul on Mars Hill, Acts 17.)

In my training you will gain practice in anticipating the five stages of resistance every audience member goes through, and the five effective responses to these stages.

Not everyone in an audience will manifest each of these attitudes but we can best assume the majority of people will. Therefore, it serves you well to anticipate all of them in every presentation in which you want people to stop doing, start doing or do something differently.

The five responses can become a structural framework for all your spoken and written communication to persuade. They apply to preaching, evangelizing, fundraising, recruiting volunteers, personal witnessing or motivating people in any way. You can use them in writing memos, reports, work papers and newsletters. They are worth writing down, memorizing, keeping on a card in your wallet, posting above your desk, and storing in your computer.

In my training you will gain skill in organizing the elements of your presentation is such a way that it naturally responds to the five stages of resistance. It will allow people to discover truth and respond to it in logical sequence. Once they discover truth, they own it and they unconsciously begin to adjust their thinking and behavior accordingly.

* I am indebted to Mr. Claude Bowen for this specific wording of the five attitudes and responses.

1. Make notes of the key elements of your story

I recommend that you do not write out stories that you plan to tell. The problem is that we write in a different style of language than we speak. If you write it out completely it will not come across naturally when you tell it. Just think through the story and make notes of the critical action and key scenes.

2. Craft a power line

The power line is the one line in the story, often the final line, which draws the whole story together and portrays its meaning. It is similar to the punch line of a joke.

Samples of power lines:

“I never took another drink after that.”

“That is when I realized I could never stop loving her.”

“So my advice is never to walk away from a crying spouse.”

3. Cut the fluff

As you practice your story, practice cutting anything that doesn’t enhance or support the power line. Don’t cut any visual aspects of the scene because those are important. Get brutal; however, get violent and merciless in cutting out generalities. A generality is anything that doesn’t connect with specific time, specific people and specific places. Cut everything that doesn’t add power to the power line. Regardless of how funny it is, how smart it makes you look or how short it makes the story, cut it. Your audience will love you for it.

4. Practice telling it with visual and emotional power.

Get alone, stand up, and practice the story. Get your voice, your face and your whole body into the scene. Feel it in your heart. Visualize your audience reacting in just the way you want them to.

1. Keep your stories short.

There is no such thing as a long story and a short story. There are only long and short versions of stories. For our training purposes and to develop the discipline of tight stories, we keep the maximum length down to two minutes.

2. Begin where the story begins.

This takes training and discipline. We are naturally inclined to introduce a story or explain what it is about before we tell it. The story is much more powerful when your audience discovers what it is about as you tell it.

3. Get to the Action.

The “Action” is where specific people are in a specific place at a specific time where specific things are happening. Action is visually oriented and emotionally engaging.

Generalities, where people “sometimes used to go here or there and do this or that” are boring, useless and pointless.

4. Stop where the story ends.

Something in our culture drives us to explain or state the moral of stories we tell. You know what happens to a joke that needs to be explained. It is the same with any story. If it needs to be explained it means was either the wrong story or it was poorly told. When you have to explain it, your listener is forced to make a judgment about whether it is true or not. When they discover truth from your story, they bypass judgment and they own it.

5. Know the opening and closing lines.

The two most critical points in a story are getting in and getting out. Getting in is easy. Just make it a habit of putting three important pieces of information in the first sentence: Answer the questions: who? when? where? Example: “In the fall of 1971 my wife and I drove a Chevrolet van from California to Quito, Ecuador…”

Getting out takes a little more thought. Think of how the punch line of a joke has to be exactly right. The “power line” of a story should be thought through and memorized. I don’t recommend that you write it out, just think it through and memorize it. It is the power line that ties the whole story together and portrays its full meaning

6. Don’t just say it; portray it.

According to research, words alone account for only seven percent of the total impact of a talk. The rest of the impact comes from your voice and non-verbals like face, gestures and body language. You can engage the other 93 percent of the impact by putting your whole person in the scene. You see the action; feel the emotions and re-live every aspect of the story.

7. Use visual images.

We all think and remember in pictures. Every story needs a scene that people can picture in their minds. Let your eyes move to see the scene; let your hands help shape it in their imaginations. React physically with your whole body to the action taking place in the story. Create imaginary props in your hands. Where there is dialogue, practice playing the role of each speaker and simulate their voices.

Avoid adjectives that don’t create mental pictures. Adjectives like “wonderful, awesome, beautiful, interesting,” are next to useless in stories. Use visual imagery like, “struck like a cannonball, “gorgeous like a fresh rose”, “more annoying than a hangnail”, “angry black storm clouds”.